There is only Zuhl

 For a variety of reasons—most of them having to do with traffic—we don’t go on excursions nearly as often as we used to when the kids were smaller.  If I’m going to schlep through an hour of traffic one way to get to the other side of town, the destination better be worth it.  Then there’s the cost to consider.  I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older that the more something costs, the higher the bar for it being a good experience.   The Children’s Museum might be amazing but if I have to drive half an hour, fight for downtown parking, and then pay $30 apiece, I’d rather get some McDonald’s and go to the park with friends.

Sometimes, though, I will take a risk.  A friend recommended the Zuhl Museum in Las Cruces, which is about 45 minutes northwest of El Paso.  It’s a small geology museum on the New Mexico State University campus.  Its tagline is “Where rocks come alive!” which seems to try a little harder than absolutely necessary to convince us that rocks are fun. At any rate, last week I hit a point where we all needed to get out of the house so I opted for a last-minute field trip.

Totally worth it.

The museum isn't much bigger than my house, but it was awesome.  There were excellent crystals and minerals found in the surrounding mountains, and massive fossils including a variety of femurs, crinoids, and nautilus shells.  The petrified wood…well, I was raised in northeastern Arizona, and I’m kind of a petrified wood snob.  It just doesn’t generally impress me.  This museum’s collection did.  Polished table-size slabs of the stuff, entire stumps, palm trees, pinecones…it was amazing.

Teenager for scale.

My favorite part was the fossil room, complete with a mosasaur skeleton and a baby mammoth that was discovered north of Fairbanks, Alaska.  (The girls and I may have whooped a little loudly, to the displeasure of the older couple sharing the museum with us.)  There were also massive bug imprints, fish skeletons, dinosaur bones, and so much more.  We've found fragments of fossils out in the desert, which is pretty common considering that 80 million years ago Texas was underwater as part of the great Inland Sea, but it was still pretty awesome to see complete versions of the plants and shells we picked out of the limestone out at the shooting range.

Mosasaurs

A dimetrodon, one of my two favorite dinosaurs--and he's happy to see you!

(The other is an ankylosaurus, if you're curious, and yes, I know dimetrodons aren't *technically* dinosaurs.  My favorite ancient reptiles, if you're going to be like that.)

Crinoids like we find in the quarry.

The docent was great.  I love talking to the staff in museums, especially smaller ones (smaller museums, not docents--the size of the person is mostly immaterial).  They always have something interesting to share.  The guy on duty was a geology student himself specializing in…I forget, but something complicated, field-based, and geological.  He had discovered some of the items on display, and he shared one of his very favorite pieces with us—a 2.5 million year old fossilized pinecone.  We all got to hold it. It was awesome. I mean, yeah, rocks are definitionally old, but this still felt like holding a piece of the past that your normal garden rock just can’t compete with.  He answered the girls’ questions and just seemed happy to have someone to talk to. 

So if you ever find yourself in Las Cruces with an hour to kill, you could do worse than the Zuhl Museum.  Yes, there are other places you could look at rocks for free, but these ones are really nice rocks.  Like really nice.

Little gifts from the docent--dinosaur models.